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Close-Up: So much to learn from the Battle of Big Thinking

Will Orr thinks the Campaign and APG event taught him about what's passe, the future and, pretty much, the meaning of life.

Staged by the Account Planning Group, the fourth Battle of Big Thinking
took place last week. Billed as "a year's thinking in a day", this was a
chance to hear 20 presentations of 15 minutes from practitioners from a
range of disciplines.

The event is brilliant. If you didn't go this year, make sure you do
next. While the quality of presentations was varied, the day as a whole
was entertaining, thought-provoking and, in places, inspiring.

There was also a discernibly purposeful and optimistic tone. I was
expecting to be told (again) that everything was new, difficult and
scary. Instead I was told, in different but strangely consistent ways,
that it was "time to get excited and make things". As Peter Sells, a
digital producer from Bartle Bogle Hegarty, reminded us in quoting
Keats, "in the long run we're all dead", so it doesn't really matter if
we make the odd mistake.

Jim Carroll, the chairman of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, once told me our
business is "25 per cent about being right, and 75 per cent about
convincing other people you're right". This event distils exactly that
challenge - successful participants mix substance and style and the only
real crime is to be boring (a crime that the majority avoided).

It is also a brilliant format because there has to be a winner, voted
for by the audience. This year's was Guy Murphy, the global planning
director at JWT.

Murphy was part of the first session on "Global Big Thinking", opening
in vaguely Alan Partridge style - "there's a brand bomb ready to go off
in our planning faces". He then brilliantly made the case for embracing
the inherent optimism and enthusiasm being shown by brands and marketers
in the emerging markets. These markets are showing "a childlike optimism
in what marketing can achieve", with less research, more instinct and
more entrepreneurship.

Murphy said it was time for an era of "brand play" where marketing was
experimental, iterative and playful, even "a joyful experience", and
brands could be "thrilling and exciting".

Here emerged a discernable theme for the day. While rigour and asking
the fundamental questions will still matter, the future will be about
doing things, changing them as you go, being iterative. As Mark Brown, a
partner at Weapon7, put it, it's about "real-time thinking" in a world
where, according to Will Harris, the UK marketing director at Nokia, "we
won't know whether or not it's right until we've done it".

It struck me how inherently uncomfortable this is going to be for many
agencies and practitioners. The control-freak tendencies of most good ad
people are going to be severely tested in this new world, as are
processes around centralised quality control. In this world of abundance
and experimentation, it won't be about everything being "signed off" by
everyone. We're going to have to get comfortable with fluidity and
uncertainty, which is challenging when you're running or working in a
big agency.

As David Hackworthy, the planning partner at The Red Brick Road,
muttered from the next seat, "free your mind and your ass will
follow".

Next up, it was Innovation, a section won by the very clever John
Willshire, the head of innovation at PHD. He said Big Thinking - a
concept based on top-down, command and control approaches - was
old-fashioned. The future is about social thinking, social production
and social media. Then followed a blizzard of clever stuff - consumers
making and sharing products, those products talking to each other or
even making themselves. Blimey.

Next up, Social Media, the very concept of which got a rough ride.
Amelia Torode, the head of strategy and innovation at VCCP, questioned
the word "media" as it suggests this stuff can be controlled and paid
for in the same way traditional media can. Overall, there was a sense
that social media isn't an end in itself or a cure-all, but a tool to be
used as part of a brand's strategy. The experts want to get back to the
underlying principles of brands and people. Social media, we were told,
is ultimately about conversations, which brands can start or participate
in. In the "hype-cycle" we're thankfully approaching the point where
people stop going on about social media, and start using it really
well.

Jeremy Ettinghaus from Penguin won this section, calling for an
"Anti-Social Media Agency", one that would "make things, and then Tweet
about them", that would "have conversations, but about selling
things".

Then it was the Planners, won by Malcolm White, a founding partner of
Krow, who invented the Battle of Big Thinking (and, to his great
chagrin, gave the concept away for free). He tried to win the
competition with a value proposition - 15 ideas in 15 minutes, a "tapas"
of ideas (more Planning Partridge). My personal favourites were "a
problem well-defined is half-solved", "if you don't understand the
numbers it's their fault" and "increase the flow". The last one was an
invitation to occasionally swap BlackBerrys for concentrated thinking,
thus stopping us "living in a half-life of constant partial
attention".

Then it was the embarrassingly named Open Mic session for the under-30s.
The standard was extremely high and the very funny James Mitchell, a
researcher at Carlson Marketing (I suggest you hire him), was the
winner. He made a case for the crisis of "too much information" and a
duty for brands to help simplify choice, create "a post-information age
of focus". More importantly, he made some good gags, which works when
you're listening to eight hours of speeches.

But when it came to gags, my vote goes to the winner of the Mobile
section - Peter Sells. The title of his presentation was: "Is it just me
or is mobile marketing a bit shit?" and it was brilliant. He managed to
unintentionally spoof the other two speakers' "the cult of the future",
while weaving stories about his girlfriends and his gambling habits into
a simple, thoughtful thesis. Namely that "we're in the business of
making people happy" and that the mobile is uniquely able to "remove
barriers to better experiences". It struck me that, while the future is
clearly about technology, it's the people who can get behind it and ask
the simple, human questions like "how are we helping people?" that will
prosper.

Another simple trend or truth emerged most clearly in the next Free (as
in the economics of) section. It's time to create things of inherent
value that people will pay for. The days of giving stuff with little
value away for free and then paying for it with unwanted advertising are
over. As Claus Moseholm, a partner at GoViral, said: "Forget free and
start earning."

And so, with the audience close to exhaustion, the stage was set for the
"purple-suited one", the winner of the Client section. Robin Wight, the
Engine chairman, made an impassioned case for a fundamental change to
communications research techniques, unchanged in more than 40 years, and
"as bad today as (they've) always been". Based on a fallacy that people
make decisions and decode things rationally, it's time for approaches
that look at unconscious decision-making. To find out more, go to
www.saveadvertising.co.uk.

And when you've done that, go to www.escapingthematrix.bassini.com where
you'll find the former Capital One marketer Justin Basini's deep
thinking. He made the case for a fundamentally new approach to
marketing, one that helps avert the onset of environmental, social and
economic disaster.

So the meaning of life, then - get excited and make things; do less
research; make things of real value; create a conversation with your
consumer that makes them happier; think about people as well as
technology; stop worrying about change and start enjoying it. Not bad
for one day's listening, so, many thanks to everyone who took part (it
must be terrifying) and to the APG.

- Will Orr is the former chief executive of WCRS.

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